Showing Up

It's a show business term, meaning to arrive on time no matter what mood you're in, how much sleep you didn't get last night, or how sick you're feeling. Showing up is what you do when you have no enthusiasm for anything, don't want to be doing whatever it is, and couldn't give a flying damn if whatever it is never gets done. Showing up is when you do stuff despite yourself. It's when you grind through your tasks and routines even though you really want to stay home because you have run out of energy, and you have no interest in anything except maybe sleep and junk food.

Eventually that mood passes, through no action of your own, and all that Showing Up means you do not have to spend the next four weeks getting back to where you were before the slump set in.

What nobody tells you is that every time you Show Up, it takes a little bit more from your capacity to feel joy and spontaneity. Show Up too often and life starts to turn grey as an August sky in England: you will not know why you are doing anything, because nothing gives you pleasure any more. You can tell people who have Showed Up too often: they never stay a minute longer than they need to, because they are not getting any pleasure from being there or anywhere else. They prefer being on their own, doing nothing that needs to be done.

People who no longer have a real reason for getting out of bed, but work a job, exercise, eat right, get regular sleep, keep themselves alert and clean: these are the maestros of Showing Up. It's what anyone who does not want to become a pathetic mess of a victim does: sober drunks and clean addicts; divorced men whose children are alienated from them; men who are never going to have a girlfriend. It's what people who almost made the Olympic team do for the rest of their lives. It's what husbands and wives in dead marriages do because their religion won't let them divorce or they can't live on their own. It's what kids who were dropped from the band do, when the band gets its first hit. It's what the children of emotionally absent parents do, unless they turn to drugs and booze and promiscuity.

Normal people do not do this. Normal people react to a hard knock by putting on weight, drinking more, turning into couch potatoes, eating badly, sleeping erratically, turning up at work unshaved now and again, having bad days right in the middle of the office, and taking up with unsuitable partners. Normal people can let themselves go, get Type II diabetes, get overweight and flabby, or lose weight and look like they might snap in the wind. Normal people do not Show Up. They expect to be taken as they are, because what else should they do?

Showing Up is not a virtue. It's a necessity. The alternative is unwashed clothes, flab, and Type II diabetes.

Some people treat it as a productivity trick, the way some people treat not drinking as a productivity trick. Not drinking when you don't have a problem with booze is harmless. Showing Up when you don't want to be there is not harmless. It's what strips you of the capacity for joy and pleasure.

I spent at least a decade of my life Showing Up, and it was way too long.

Now I have to figure out how one lives without Showing Up.

Retirement is not about optimisation. It's about avoiding the downward slopes

You know my standard phrase: Work hard, exercise, eat right, don't drink too much, pay your damn taxes, and only spend money on things you need and can afford.

That's for people with jobs. (Employment Privilege?)

What about those of us who no longer go to work?

What replaces the "work hard" bit?

Some people find a different job, or volunteer, but that doesn't replace "working hard". That replaces "go to the office".

I'm sure some people who have grandchildren would tell me that "see more of your grandkids" is an answer, and I'd agree it's part of the answer. For them.

I think there are two questions here:

What replaces "leaving home every day for the workplace / waking up and pulling the laptop onto your lap"?

and

What replaces "meetings / e-mails / Powerpoints / spreadsheets / client lunches / (enter other work dross here)"?

To the first question: there is a benefit to leaving the house for a few hours a few days each week. When the weather is acceptable. That does not mean turning into Diamond Geezer, and riding the buses and trains all day.

To the second question: my (first) thought is that nothing needs to - unless you will go crazy if you're not busy.

I read. I will get back to watching movies and box sets, but only when what I see on the screen is something like what I see outside. (Ever notice that nobody wears masks in those old movies. What was that about?) I have intentions of learning to read music on the piano, but every time I try to play both lines of a simple piece, something goes in my head, like my brain is trying to use connections that aren't there. There's always maths and a higher standard of housework. Also gardening. It's too damn cold and rainy right now, but I do need to do some maintenance gardening.

None of that counts as 'busy'.

'Busy' would be making random trips round London, under the guise of 'doing photography'. Or joining yoga classes. Or volunteering. Or going round every art gallery in the country. Or some other random project. 'Busy' means doing stuff you wouldn't do if you had anything better to do. (I still want to take photographs, and I'm starting to figure out what the blocker is. It's not what you might think, but that's for another day.)

Sometimes it helps to look at an alternative. I could stay in bed all day, order in pizza, move the TV into my bedroom, watch The Sopranos from start to finish and not take a shower for month. As long as I avoid that kind of non-activity (allowed only for a really bad cold) anything else is okay.

Retirement is not about optimisation. It's about avoiding the downward slopes.

Week Three of Retirement

Started badly with a real pain in my right hip that distracted the heck out of me and required expensive servicing by my magic osteopath.

Also a visit to my dentist to collect a new gum shield for my lower teeth. After what I spent and went through getting my teeth straightened out, I am not giving up the maintenance.

I read Michel Houellebecq's latest, Serotonin, in one pass. It's very good, but not edifying.

I noticed that I'm able to hear orchestral music more easily now. Sound quality is one thing, but it's almost like I now have the brain-space to process it.

I've just cancelled Spotify Premium. Because I haven't even wanted to have one of their playlists on in the background.

It feels like work filled my head with a lot of clutter and noise, and left me feeling tired and only able to deal with stuff needing short spans of attention.

Now my head is a less clamorous place.

But this weather is dispiriting. The pollen doesn't agree with me. I wake up with a stuffed-up nose and feeling like someone slipped some drugs into my sleep. I haven't been out much. Right now, I never want to walk in my local park again.

Everyone has duff weeks now and again.

When To Retire?

For reasons to do with psychology, I found it hard to write about the process of deciding to retire. So I'm going to backtrack a little. Google "when should I retire" and most of the answers are about having enough investments and income. If you really like your job and the people you work with, you should probably not leave just yet. Seems like a sensible comment.

Assume the money thing is sorted. (That's another subject.)

Did I like my job? Like / dislike had nothing to do with it. Sometime in the Winter of 20/21, I checked out of the job. Checking out is its own thing (discussion to follow). Did I like the people? Sure. Am I going to miss them? Not so much that I'd notice. Work colleagues are not friends.

I can keep myself occupied and am happy with my own company. I'm not going to start drinking and over-eating. I might start sleeping in, but by my standards that would be 07:30. So that's okay.

My life expectancy is 85. But I'm not so sure. I spent twenty years smoking and drinking with unreasonable gusto. There's a lot of longevity on my mother's side of the family, not so much on my father's. He died at 65 of stomach cancer. I'm already older than my father when he died.

I'd like to do some stuff while I can still walk for a whole day.

It would be incredibly easy to stop WFH and take my house back for myself...

...never to answer another question that needs some tortuous SQL-bashing...

...never to have to work my way round the damn bureaucracy again.

That's why I was irritated when people want me to think about it.

Either that, or increased irritability is a by-product of The Jab.

(Actually, we should blame everything on the jab. I swear that my voice has acquired a slight croak, and remembering names can be a real stumper.)

One thought I picked up from the dross that is so often the result of a Google search:  you have a sense that you would regret continuing to work full time if you did it for much longer.

In the five minutes after reading that, I thought:

Yes I would regret it. I really can't see me working-from-home past about September 2021. So I'm really worrying about which exact month between now and September will be my last paycheque. Frankly, I may as well leave that to serendipity. And not hang on for the last paycheque.

So I went from September to filling in the forms at the start of April with a month's notice. Bang!

And never had a moment's doubt.

So That's The Day Job Over...

I have finally retired. The last day was April 30th, which meant that the first non-working day was Tuesday 4th May. Weekends and Bank Holidays happen when we'e at work.

I am not going to miss the day job. I would have missed it if I had been commuting and seeing everyone in the office. Then retiring would have felt like a much bigger change, and far more abrupt when it happened. But a year of working from home and I had already made all the adjustments. All retirement involved was not opening the work laptop and not signing on to Teams and running reports. Which is no loss at all.

My plans for travelling are on hold until the hysterics are over, which will be about 2023, or until those of us who have been 'jabbed' (notice how they can't bring themselves to say 'inoculated') can move around without let or hinderance, except to places where we wouldn't want to go anyway.

I can't even pop out for a spot of lunch, since it's a) freezing, and b) the restaurants are still half-closed.

I did pop out for a spot of non-food shopping, in the Kingston John Lewis, and realised that I have always hated that kind of shopping, and doubly so now when I have to wear a mask. John Lewis have gone full retard on how many people can use lifts. Not going there again. I'll use their online site. If there's one thing I've learned to do in the lockdown, it's online shopping. Books, DVDs, food, shoes and clothes: almost everything else can be had online or by phone with a trial period.

So my days will be full of arranging and doing little things until, you know...

Which is just fine by me.

Retirement Countdown

I have to talk about this.

In three weeks' time I will stop working.

I have to fill in some forms, and one reason I haven't already done so is that I did not have a black ink pen in the house, so I had to buy one on Thursday. And some stamps. On Friday I woke up late and did nothing. I should have been filling in pension forms and getting the flat tire on the car fixed. Instead I watched You Tube videos on anything and generally futzed the time away. I got a walk and a few reps in, just so I hadn't had a complete wasted day. Then I went to bed at 22:00, and came back downstairs at 23:30. No sleep Saturday morning. That happens when I feel guilty about leaving things undone. I felt guilty because I'm supposed to be Superman, and never have a bad day.

I spent a lot of time on Saturday dark morning thinking that the sleepless night was about retiring, and not having a job and all those other cliches.

I'm totally down with the I-will-not-have-a-job-to-wake-up-to-do bit. Me? Miss the day job? Have you met me?

Not getting the tyres fixed is about me being indecisive and lazy and maybe it's the pollen. I wake up with a blocked nose, itching and sneezing. At 04:30. I kept dozing until 08:00 Friday, and spent the rest of the day being an hour behind schedule.

If I was going into the office, I would have a countdown of days left commuting. I would be having handover meetings and chats with people. I would have something anchoring me to work in those last days.

But I'm at home. I've been at home for over a year now. My unconscious heard me say I was resigning, took a look around, saw that it was home, and checked out of the job. It thinks I'm done, and it does not like it when I keep opening the work laptop. It gets confused.

I can't concentrate on work because I've almost left it. I can't concentrate on organising things in my life, because I'm still at work.

It's not retirement I can't handle.

It's these last three weeks.

Retirement Thoughts - Part Three

The longer I go on working, the later I have to live on a very much reduced income – though also with (not as much as you’d think) reduced expenses. However, I can’t say that I’m enjoying the life I lead while working. It’s not a drudge, but it is a chore – though that may be a fine distinction. There’s not a lot, if anything, about it that I’ll miss, and I have tried to make out a list of things that I really might miss. In terms of quality of life, I’m not convinced that life on a lesser income in retirement will be less than on this income working. Life will be different. Slower. Smaller things will feel like worthwhile achievements and it will take less to make a good day. (Pottering up and back to a museum between the rush hours will constitute a ‘good day out’, for instance. Some work in the garden or a spot of decorating will be a ‘good little job’). Right now, I’m not doing anything much except working, the gym, and basic housework / shopping / washing / stuff. This does not feel like achieving anything except a vague defiance of the Gods of Ageing.

You know the joke? The older I get, the less I pay to live. I get free NHS prescriptions, free eye tests every two years, and because I’m in London, I get free travel on London Transport at any time, plus free National Rail travel out to Zone 6 after the morning rush hour. After January 2020, my net salary will go up, because I won’t have to pay National Insurance (!), though the extra will be taxed. And I can take the State Pension and still work(!!), thought that will still be taxed. Tax or not, that’s a decent lump of money to put in the bank if made for a year, so maybe I should go on until June 2021 just because devilment.

I have been trying to figure out how to improve the quality of my life while I’m working, but that damned 05:30 wake-up and commute gets in the way. Maybe I need to accept that, at this age, simply getting up, commuting, putting in a day’s work amongst people half my age, three times my energy and in the same league as regards smarts, well, that’s enough for one day. I can get home, goof off reading or watching something, go to bed, and that’s been a good day. Sounds simple enough, but I’m having problems with the idea that it is enough.

Oh mutter mutter. This doesn’t have a neatly-resolved conclusion. I can tell. So here’s a photograph instead.

Retirement Thoughts - Part Two

“I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that”. That stayed with me for all of the Wednesday evening I wrote it and then evaporated on Thursday. My brave plans to commute in on Friday evaporated, and I schlepped the laptop home Thursday evening. Friday morning I was tired, tired in that I-have-to-physically-recover way, in the way that means the only thinking I wanted to do was the stuff on reflex, that happens in meetings.

Another twenty months of that?

I didn’t feel like this at the start of the year. I have spared you from reading all sorts of probably bogus pop-psych reasons why I might be feeling this way. Two major things have happened this year: my friend died over the summer. and we moved offices. Loss can be mourned, bad offices have to be worked in every day.

After leaving the Paradise that was the Shaftesbury Avenue office, they moved me to Bishopsgate. Where I am now makes Bishopsgate look like the West End. I get in at 07:30, and carry on with reading overlooking the back streets of the Barbican until 08:00. A few years ago, I would sit in the Caffè Nero near Holborn station for an hour, read, write or watch the people go by, but City workers are not watchable people and no City street has the presence of Kingsway. There’s no buzz in the City, just bustle. There’s a difference.

The new office is dark. The floor space is huge. The staff / desk ratio is 1.85:1. The per-person desk space is half what is was at the last office. There’s no assigned seating, so I can have total strangers sitting next to me. Even if I know them, it’s possible that we will go the whole day and not say anything to each other - office cameraderie is a thing of the past. This isn’t because I’m a mardy old git: I see the same happening to other people. They spend much of the day with headsets on, staring into an empty middle-distance. Before they would have travelled to a meeting, and actually seen the people they were talking to. Yeah, I know, productivity. However, a conference call is cheap, and if it’s a waste of time, who cares? Not so productive.

I can’t work in the chairs, and the desks are the wrong height, so I take my laptop, put on my Bose noise-cancellers and find an armchair(!) to work in for as long as I need to. I need the noise-cancellers because there are people talking in loud-and-clear telephone voices everywhere. No work requiring concentration gets done in that office except under headphones. Want to know why bank systems keep going wrong? One reason is that the on-shored workforce can’t concentrate because they keep bashing each other’s elbows, and they can’t focus enough to see the edge case they missed, which is why you see that webpage telling you there’s been an error. The air-conditioning is at least two levels cheap below where it needs to be for so many people and computers, and as we found out when there was a fire in the cafe on a lower floor, the air is re-cycled, not exchanged. The place smelled of damp-bonfire smoke all day.

It doesn’t help that the uber-manager is two hundred miles away and appears once a week. That affects the way the unter-managers are motivated and behave. They aren’t getting regular in-person verbal and body-language feedback from the only person who matters in their (working) lives. All they get are e-mails and the boss’s carefully managed behaviour on visiting day. The unters don’t feel secure or validated. Absentee uber-managers are not a good idea.

I find the place draining: lord alone knows how I get to the gym afterwards. The most I can hope for after this monumental whinge is that I stop wondering if it’s something physiological or some pop-science nonsense about getting older.

Okay. That’s the whinge over. Let’s try to be constructive here.

Retirement Thoughts - Part One

I can collect my State Pension from the 6th January 2020, about eight months later than they originally promised the schoolboy me. For some reason, this thought is at the front of my mind a lot of the time. Being able to ‘retire’, to give up the daily grind, to lay in bed until I want to get up, instead of when overcrowded trains say I need to get up. And most of all, never to have to go through the annual appraisal process, which is like going into a dark room where someone might throw the lights on and shout ‘Suprise’, or they might just stab you in the back over and over and then expect you to get back to your desk and work.

However, I’m cranky and odd enough at the moment as an older man who lives alone. Withdrawing from all contact with the human race might not be good for me. Except...

Was I the only person who wondered about equating dealing with the people at work and on trains as ‘contact with the human race’? Is it really? Are they really? I don’t mean that they may as well be Russian bots... no actually I do. Because the contact we have with people at work is not the contact the therapists and psychologists allege we need. And it’s certainly not the ‘intimate’ - the great weasel word of pop-psychology - contact they promise will make us all feel better.

Retirement partly promises a respite: the end of all the keeping-up-appearances for the sake of what-for-Christ’s-sake? Partly it’s a threat: much smaller income, no protection from inflation, continued exposure to property taxes and income tax. And sometimes I look at it as an opportunity: time to rest at last, to watch movies, to read and re-read, to potter round the house and garden, because that’s self-care as well, to work out at the local gym in the quiet periods. And maybe to go on the occasional Diamond Geezer-esque excursion on my Freedom Pass. I don’t want to go round the world: it’s not what it was when I was at school, and I can’t afford it.

So how long do I go on working? Until January 2020 at least. And unless I get a bad appraisal, I may as well hang around to collect what little bonus it will be, which means I stay until June. If I don’t take much holiday, I can walk away with three week’s holiday money as well.

Or I could ask to do a four-day week, and work from home Mondays. This still brings money in, but it’s the expensive option. I lose twenty per cent of my income and that’s where a lot of the cash saving is coming from. Reduced days feels like a compromise that won’t really work. The point is to be free of work forever, to change the way I live, not just to have an extra day off. ‘Working from home’ on Fridays gets much the same thing accomplished.

I retire full-time or carry on working full-time. And I do that until I really can’t do it anymore. As in, I get half-way to work on the morning commute and go sit in a caff until the rush hour passes. That’s going to be a long time.

Until then, and to get through to at least June 2020, I need to adjust how I’m eating, working, exercising, challenging and entertaining myself. It really is getting to the point where I believe that simply going through the commute-work-gym-commute cycle is taking as much energy as I have. This is not true, but thinking makes it so. It’s not forever, but the next twenty months. I can do twenty months, but I’d rather work out some way of not thinking of it quite like that. I may carry on working until I drop, or I may barely make it to June 2020. All sorts of political and economic mayhem can happen between now and then, and I may be working for the rest of my life, or lots of us might be out of work.